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Whitehouse.gov Has A New Face
- josefresco 18y agoI want to know who did the new design/site work?
- showerst 18y agoI don't have any idea, but Blue State Digital did his campaign site and a bunch of other dem 08 work, so perhaps it was them.
- tptacek 18y agoBlue State Digital built CHANGE.GOV, and this is pretty clearly a continuation, although the impression I get is that they've brought a lot of it in-house.
- seehafer 18y agoMacon Phillips, who is listed on LinkedIn as a "Director of Strategy and Communications for Blue State Digital" is now the Director of New Media for the Executive Office of the President: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/change_has_come_to_whitehouse-gov/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/change_has_come_to_whitehouse...
- smhinsey 18y agoI thought BSD was a shoe-in for this as well, but if you view source you'll see the hallmarks of ASP.NET (viewstate and control naming), which throws me.
- pstinnett 18y agoYeah. BSD used their own CMS and ExpressionEngine I think. Kind of surprised that this is in ASP.NET. Wouldn't be surprised if it changes later on.
- transburgh 18y agoI don't know what to think that the site has a blog.
- redorb 18y agodoesn't have comments (to avoid trolls and spam) - and its basically a "hip" way of saying a press release in a conversational tone. I think its ok.
- trickjarrett 18y agoIt's also built using jQuery as tweeted by jResig. I was hoping Obama would begin using twitter immediately after taking the Presidency. We'll see if the twitter account falls into the history books and is not utilized.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoI think I'm prepared to forgive the President for not having the time to post on Twitter.
- trickjarrett 18y agoOh I'm not going to think less of him should the account not be used again.
- henning 18y agoWhat? No. He has to spend 15 hours a day checking email and tweeting like Gary Vaynerchuk says! Social media!!
- wheels 18y agodm @joeyb Bleh, this Gordon guy is boring me to tears. Your turn next time. Bar ltr?
- steveplace 18y agoaccording to @sacca he'll get back on. And by him I mean his PR machine.
- nirmal 18y agoWho's going to add the Whitehouse blog to their feedreader?
- brandonkm 18y agoI'm sure a ton of people will. In fact, I would bet that the whitehouse blog may introduce lots of people to RSS for the first time ever. The concept of a more transparent government where citizens are informed about the happenings inside the white house will be heavily at play here.
- blogimus 18y agoWhitehouse.gov also has a new robots.txt file ( http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt ) If you search google for 'whitehouse' and 'robots' then you can still see the cache of the robots.txt file of the Bush Administration (http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:tCfemw3M-aUJ:www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt+whitehouse+robots http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:tCfemw3M-aUJ:www.whiteho...)
- jhancock 18y agoGod Bless!!! A geek's definition of Freedom!!! What a diff.
- vaksel 18y agogood catch
- keyes 18y agoAll the URLs in the former robots.txt seem to end in "/text". It's likely that they just didn't want the text versions of the articles to be indexed.
- jonknee 18y agoYou are correct. The text versions were present for screen readers.
- sh1mmer 18y agoInstead of just using good markup in the first place?
- jonknee 18y agoGood markup can't handle it all, text-only mode allows for stuff like having a transcript instead of a video with a link to a transcript. Text-only mode is even available on the new site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/accessibility/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/accessibility/ "In addition to the features that make the graphics version of the site more accessible, a text-only version provides added convenience for users." I'm not sure how to access it though, maybe that feature hasn't launched yet.
- showerst 18y agoThe main big block of text next to the picture is a jpg, and looks like it has a ton of compression artifacts. tsk tsk! =) Other than that it's an awesome site, definitely the best government agency site I've ever seen.
- noonespecial 18y agoThose aren't compress... wait.. yessss that's exactly what they are. Compression artifacts. Move along. You didn't see nuthin'.
- bgutierrez 18y agoEven better, it's valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehous...
- axod 18y ago//<![CDATA[ Why is this good? & why is it better than HTML4.01 Strict? XHTML is not beautiful. //]]>
- teej 18y agoXHTML is also pointless when it's served up at text/html
- evdawg 18y agoWho cares if it validates? The underlying markup is pretty unsemantic. Just because it validates doesn't mean it's a well-coded website.
- DTrejo 18y agoIt seems pretty slow - I guess that's a good sign (many people looking at it?)
- jrnkntl 18y agoBut why are they using some external commercial company for visitor analytics? (webtrendslive.com)
- ALee 18y agoprobably because of government contract, but also because in the DC region WebTrends is well-known as an analytics tool
- TweedHeads 18y agoAnd so does http://whitehouse.net http://whitehouse.net
- TweedHeads 18y agoScreenshot http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7974/chinahousehd8.png http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7974/chinahousehd8.png
- run4yourlives 18y agoThe President of the United States now has a blog. Unbelievable only a year ago, really.
- froo 18y agoYes, but one must wonder if he uses "The Google"
- callahad 18y agoCheck out http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/ "Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License."
- danielrhodes 18y agoThis doesn't mean much. I believe all works produced by the federal government are in the public domain and you don't need permission to reproduce them.
- callahad 18y agoTrue, and covered in the first of the three paragraphs at that link: "Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise." The news is that they're defaulting to Creative Commons for all "third-party content" on the site, including user submissions. That's the part that got me. Even if they're not producing it, they're trying to keep information open (as opposed to just requiring copyright assignment, for instance)
- cmos 18y agook, am I the only fool who got a bit teary eyed when going through whitehouse.gov? Whether you agree with his politics or not, you have to admit that he is going to change the way we interact with our government. "President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause"